YouTube App for iPad and iPhone to Disappear in iOS 6

iPad and iPhone owners who download the next generation of software for their handsets later this year may be in for a surprise. 9to5mac noticed the YouTube app for iPad and iPhone will no longer be there in the coming iOS 6 release.

The YouTube app on iPad and iPhone was created by Apple’s own developers using YouTube’s open developer tools. Now Apple says the final version of iOS 6 will be released in the fall. “Our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended,” says Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller. “Customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser, and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store.”

If you’ve spent any time with the iOS YouTube app, you’d know how terrible it was. The 3G video quality was poor, the features were limited, the buffering times were slow. It was inconvenient and unpleasant, basically the opposite of what YouTube is.

For those of you who fancy the easy-to-use app, you don’t have to be saddled with a piss poor YouTube app.You’ll have a couple of choices once iOS 6 rolls around this fall. You can either use the Safari web browser to do your YouTube browsing, as it will now support in-browser playback. Or, you can download the separate YouTube app that is currently being built by Google and will be available in the App Store — though its release date has not yet been revealed. Or, you can use the 3rd-party Mac or Windows app to convert YouTube to iPad compatible formats and then sync to the iPad device.